Monthly Archives: August 2017

London Summer School in Intellectual History keynote addresses

We are pleased to announce the details of the Summer School opening and closing keynotes, which will be open to all:

Monday, 4 September 2017, 17:00 — 18:30 @ Gustav Tuck LT, UCL: Opening Keynote Lecture: Prof. Ann Thomson, European University Institute (EUI), on ‘Enlightenment Anti-Colonialism? Raynal, Diderot, and l’Histoire des deux Indes’

Thursday, 7 September 2017, 14:00 — 15:30 @ Chadwick B.05, UCL: Closing Keynote Lecture: Prof. Quentin Skinner (QMUL), on ‘Machiavelli and the Virtues of the Prince’

Symposium on the work of Martin E. Jay

We are pleased to announce the programme for the Centre’s Annual International Symposium in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which will be held on Friday, 15 June 2018. The symposium is devoted to the work of Professor Martin E. Jay (Berkeley), and registration is essential. To download the conference programme, please click here. For the conference poster, please click here.

2018 Annual Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture

Please save the date for the 2018 Annual Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture in Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought, which will be delivered by Samuel Moyn (Yale). The lecture, titled ‘Judith Shklar’s Critique of Cold War Liberalism’, will be followed by a drinks reception, to which all are welcome. Registration for this event is essential.

Abstract

Political liberalism is today in dire straits. Cold War legacies have made it a dubious theory of individual liberty against the expansive state rather than a doctrine that promotes social freedom and material equality. This lecture will focus on the leading post-War American political thinker, Judith Shklar – returning, decades before she propounded her famous “liberalism of fear,” to her earliest writings. These in effect mounted an argument against her future self. Shklar’s first book, After Utopia, offered a critique of the limits of Cold War liberalism, before she herself came to adopt a version of it. The lecture will assess this early perspective, claiming that it represents a more attractive option in the face of the crisis of liberalism today.